Category: Compositions

A Journalist/1

1. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. –Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting 2. She had first traveled to Vietnam in 1955, glad to see that…

A Prayer

1. The following prayer was composed by Dr. Gordon Livingston, who graduated from West Point and did three tours in Vietnam as a surgeon with the 11th Armored Calvary Regiment. At a 1968 ceremony for…

Composing “HOWL”

Here’s Allen Ginsberg talking about the process of writing HOWL, which is reminiscent of Natalie Goldberg’s project in Writing down the Bones, to free the writer within: I thought I wouldn’t write a poem but…

The Asian Mind/The American Mind

1. The following remarks are from Captain Ted Shipman, a U.S. intelligence officer in South Vietnam: “You see, they do have some–well, methods and practices that we are not accustomed to, that we wouldn’t use…

Impossible Debt?

1. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps…

A Brief Consideration of Napalm

1. American Heritage Dictionary Napalm, incendiary material used in bombs and flame throwers. Developed during World War II, napalm is a mixture of gasoline (sometimes mixed with other petroleum fuels) and a thickening agent. The…

Ko Un

1. Ko Un‘s Ten Thousand Lives is a remarkable sample in English of his twenty-volume work in Korean, known as Maninbo.  In his early years, he was a Buddhist monk.  Later, he was part of…